On Friday, 24 February 2012 at 17:54:47 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> You could just pad the unused space with blank pixels.
whoa, make a tile based system, like the NES.
There's a private use area in unicode, 16 bits of space I think.
You could define a tile set to use that, or a simple bitmap
format,
but it isn't enough room to do on demand tiles I think.
Imagine this though, your terminal lets the app define new
characters,
in color. The protocol might be an escape sequence then you go
ahead and write out an image using whatever format (xpm or base64
png - something you can easily enough represent as text.)
Then, you overwrite a private use character. You can then write
that character to display the custom glyph.
Now, you treat it just like any other character for writing,
scrolling, read back, etc. Mixes right in with text.
Now, you won't be able to just "cat image.png", but you could
write a cat that does it. Define a tileset for a line, write
it out, repeat and let it scroll to show the whole image.
65535 * what's a character size, like 13x9, something like that?
You could write out a nice, big image without worrying about tile
reuse.
I think I like this..., it'd fit pretty well with the existing
terminal setup and add the new functions.